The way of this world is to praise
dead saints and persecute living ones. Nathaniel Howe

Afterword

Julian Jaynes,
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral
Mind,

It is now
more than a decade since this essay first appeared in book form, and my
publishers have encouraged me to add a postscript in which I might
discuss the general reaction to this book as well as changes I might
make if I were to rewrite it.

A
favorite practice of some professional intellectuals when at first faced
with a theory as large as the one I have presented is to search for that
loose thread which, when pulled, will unravel all the rest. And rightly
so. It is part of the discipline of scientific thinking. In any work
covering so much of the terrain of human nature and history, hustling
into territories jealously guarded by myriad aggressive specialists,
there are bound to be such errancies, sometimes of fact but I fear more
often of tone. But that the knitting of this book is such that a tug on
such a bad stitch will unravel all the rest is more of a hope on the
part of the orthodox than a fact in the scientific pursuit of truth.
The book is not a single hypothesis.

There are four main hypotheses in Books I and II. I welcome this
opportunity to add some comments to each of them.

1. Consciousness is based on language.
Such a
statement is of course contradictory to the usual and I think
superficial views of consciousness that are embedded both in popular
belief and in language. But there can be no progress in the science of
consciousness until careful distinctions have been made between what is
introspectable and all the hosts of other neural abilities we have come
to call cognition. Consciousness is not the same as cognition and
should be sharply distinguished from it.

The
most common error which I did not emphasize sufficiently is to confuse
consciousness with perception. Recently, at a meeting of the Society
for Philosophy and Psychology, a well-known and prestigious philosopher
stood up to object vociferously on this point. Looking at me directly,
he exclaimed, "I am perceiving you at this moment. Are you trying to
say that I am not conscious of you at this moment?" A collective
cognitive imperative in him was proclaiming in the affirmative. But
actually he was being conscious of the rhetorical argument he was
making. He could have better been conscious of me if he had turned away
from me or had closed his eyes.

This type of confusion was at least encouraged back in I921 by Bertrand
Russell: "We are conscious of anything that we perceive."[1]
And as his logical atomism became fashionable in philosophy, it became
difficult to see it any other way. And in a later book Russell uses as
an example of consciousness "I see a table.”[2]
But Descartes, who gave us the modern idea of consciousness, would never
have agreed. Nor would a radical behaviorist like Watson, who in
denying consciousness existed certainly did not mean sense perception.

Just as in the case I mentioned above, I suggest Russell was not being
conscious of the table, but of the argument he was writing about. In my
own notation, I would diagram the situation as

‘I’ → (I
see a table).

Russell
thought his consciousness was the second term, but in reality it was the
entire expression. He should have found a more ethologically valid
example that was really true of his consciousness, that had really
happened, such as, "I think I will rewrite the Principia now that
Whitehead's dead" or "How can I afford the alimony for another Lady
Russell?" He would then have come to other conclusions. Such examples
are consciousness in action. "I see a table" is not.

Perception is sensing a stimulus and responding appropriately. And this
can happen on a non-conscious level, as I have tried to describe in
driving a car. Another way to look at the problem is to remember the
behavior of white blood Cells) which certainly perceive bacteria and
respond appropriately by devouring them. To equate consciousness with
perception is thus tantamount to saying that we have six thousand
conscious entities per cubic millimeter of blood whirling around in our
circulatory system –which I think is a reductio ad absurdum.

Consciousness is not all language, but it is generated by it and
accessed by it. And when we begin to untease the fine reticulation of
how language generates consciousness we are on a very difficult level of
theorizing. The primordial mechanisms by which this happens in history
I have outlined briefly and then in II:5 tried to show how this worked
out in the development of consciousness in Greece. Consciousness then
becomes embedded in language and so is learned easily by children. The
general rule is: there is no operation in consciousness that did not
occur in behavior first.

To
briefly review, if we refer to the circle triangle problem on page 40,
in solving this struction we say, "I 'see' it's a triangle," though of
course we are not actually seeing anything. In the struction of finding
how to express this solving of the problem, the metaphor of actual
seeing pops into our minds. Perhaps there could be other metaphiers[3]
leading to a different texture of consciousness, but in Western culture
'seeing' and the other words with which we try to anchor mental events
are indeed visual. And by using this word 'see', we bring with it its
paraphiers, or associates of actual seeing.

In
this way the spatial quality of the world around us is being driven into
the psychological fact of solving a problem (which as we remember needs
no consciousness). And it is this associated spatial quality that, as a
result of the language we use to describe such psychological events,
becomes with constant repetitions this functional space of our
consciousness, or mind-space. Mind-space I regard as the primary
feature of consciousness. It is the space which you pre-optively are
'introspecting on' or 'seeing' at this very moment.

But
who does the 'seeing’? Who does the introspecting? Here we introduce
analogy, which differs from metaphor in that the similarity is between
relationships rather than between things or actions. As the body with
its sense organs (referred to as I) is to physical seeing, so there
develops automatically an analog ‘I' to relate to this mental kind of
'seeing' in mind-space. The analog 'I' is the second most important
feature of consciousness. It is not to be confused with the self, which
is an object of consciousness in later development. The analog 'I' is
contentless, related I think to Kant's transcendental ego. As the
bodily ‘I’ can move about in its environment looking at this or that, so
the analog 'I' learns to 'move about' in mind-space, 'attending to' or
concentrating on one thing or another.

All
the procedures of consciousness are based on such metaphors and
analogies with behavior, constructing a careful matrix of considerable
stability. And so we narratize the analogic simulation of actual
behavior, an obvious aspect of consciousness which seems to have escaped
previous synchronic discussions of consciousness. Consciousness is
constantly fitting things into a story, putting a before and an after
around any event. This feature is an analog of our physical selves
moving about through a physical world with its spatial successiveness
which becomes the successiveness of time in mind-space. And this
results in the conscious conception of time which is a spatialized time
in which we locate events and indeed our lives. It is impossible to be
conscious of time in any other way than as a space.

The
basic connotative definition of consciousness is thus an analog 'I'
narratizing in a functional mind-space. The denotative definition is,
as it was for Descartes, Locke, and Hume, what is introspectable.

My
list of features is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive. Nor are
they meant to be universal aspects of consciousness everywhere. Given
the great cultural differences in the world today, just as in the
world's past, it seems to me unreasonable to think that the features and
emphases of consciousness would be everywhere the same.

As
it stands, the list I have given is I think incomplete. At least two
other features should be added: concentration, which is the
analog of sensory attention,[4]and suppression, by which we stop being conscious of annoying
thoughts, the behavioral analog of repugnance, disgust, or simply
turning away from annoyances in the physical world.

I
would also take this opportunity of commenting on what is called in this
book conciliation or compatibilization, which have perplexed some
readers. At the risk of even more confusion, I would change this word
to consilience, which is Whewell's better term for my intended
meaning of mental processes that make things compatible with each other.[5]
While this is not so obvious in waking life, it becomes extremely
important in dreams. Originally, I had written two chapters on dreams
to go in the present volume, but my publishers suggested that because of
the length of the book, it seemed more reasonable to save them for the
next volume, which I hope will appear in several years.[6]

Psychologists are sometimes justly accused of the habit of reinventing
the wheel and making it square and then calling it a first
approximation. I would demur from agreement that that is true in the
development that I have just outlined, but I would indeed like to call
it a first approximation. Consciousness is not a simple matter and it
should not be spoken of as if it were. Nor have I mentioned the
different modes of conscious narratization such as verbal (having
imaginary conversations—certainly the most common mode in myself),
perceptual (imagining scenes), behavioral (imagining ourselves doing
something), physiological (monitoring our fatigue or discomfort or
appetite), or musical (imagining music), all of which seem quite
distinct, with properties of their own. Such modes have obviously
different neural substrates, indicating the complexity of any possible
neurology of consciousness.

2. The bicameral mind.
The
second main hypothesis is that preceding consciousness there was a
different mentality based on verbal hallucinations. For this I think
the evidence is overwhelming. Wherever we look in antiquity, there is
some kind of evidence that supports it, either in literary texts or in
archeological artifacts. Apart from this theory, why are there gods?
Why religions? Why does all ancient literature seem to be about gods
and usually heard from gods?

And
why do we have verbal hallucinations at all? Before the publication of
this book, verbal hallucinations were not paid much attention to, except
as the primary indicator of schizophrenia. But since that time, a
flurry of studies have shown that the incidence of verbal hallucinations
is far more widespread than was thought previously. Roughly one third
of normal people hear hallucinated voices at some time. Children hear
voices from their imaginary or we should say hallucinated playmates. It
has recently been discovered that congenital quadriplegics who have
never in their lives spoken or moved, and are often regarded as
"vegetables," not only understand language perfectly but also hear
voices they regard as God.[7]
The importance I put on these studies taken together is that they
clearly indicate to me that there is a genetic basis for such
hallucinations in us all) and that it was probably evolved into the
human genome back in the late Pleistocene, and then became the basis for
the bicameral mind.

3. The dating.
The third
general hypothesis is that consciousness was learned only after the
breakdown of the bicameral mind. I believe this is true, that the
anguish of not knowing what to do in the chaos resulting from the loss
of the gods provided the social conditions that could result in the
invention of a new mentality to replace the old one.

But
actually there are two possibilities here. A weak form of the theory
would state that, yes, consciousness is based on language, but instead
of its being so recent, it began back at the beginning of language,
perhaps even before civilization, say, about I2)000 B.C., at about the
time of the beginning of the bicameral mentality of hearing voices.
Both systems of mind then could have gone on together until the
bicameral mind became unwieldy and was sloughed off, leaving
consciousness on its own as the medium of human decisions. This is an
extremely weak position because it could then explain almost anything
and is almost undisprovable.

The
strong form is of greater interest and is as I have stated it in
introducing the concept of the bicameral mind. It sets an astonishingly
recent date for the introduction into the world of this remarkable
privacy of covert events which we call consciousness. The date is
slightly different in different parts of the world, but in the Middle
East, where bicameral civilization began, the date is roughly 1000 B.C.

This dating I think can be seen in the evidence from Mesopotamia, where
the breakdown of the bicameral mind, beginning about 1200 B.C., is quite
clear. It was due to chaotic social disorganizations, to
overpopulation, and probably to the success of writing in replacing the
auditory mode of command. This breakdown resulted in many practices we
would now call religious which were efforts to return to the lost voices
of the gods, e.g., prayer, religious worship, and particularly the many
types of divination I have described, which are new ways of making
decisions by supposedly returning to the directions of gods by simple
analogy.

I
would not now make as much of the Thera explosion as I did in II-3. But
that it did cause the disruption of theocracy in the Near East and hence
the conditions for the learning of a non-hallucinatory mentality is I
think valid. But in the general case, I would rather emphasize that the
success of a theocratic agricultural civilization brings with it
overpopulation and thus the seeds of its own breakdown. This is
suggested at least among the civilizations of Mesoamerica, where the
relative rapidity of the rise and fall of civilizations with the
consequent desertion of temple complexes contrasts with the
millennia-long civilizations in the older parts of the world.

But
is this consciousness or the concept of consciousness? This is the
well-known use-mention criticism which has been applied to Hobbes and
others as well as to the present theory. Are we not confusing here the
concept of consciousness with consciousness itself? My reply is that we
are fusing them, that they are the same. As Dan Dennett has pointed out
in a recent discussion of the theory,[8]
there are many instances of mention and use being identical. The
concept of baseball and baseball are the same thing. Or of money, or
law, or good and evil. Or the concept of this book.

4. The double brain.
When in
any discussion or even in our thinking we can use spatial terms, as in
"locating" a problem or ((situating" a difficulty in an argument, as if
everything in existence were spread out like land before us, we seem to
get a feeling of clarity. This pseudo-clarity, as it should be called,
in because of the spatial nature of consciousness. So in locating
functions in different parts of the brain we seem to get an extra surge
of clarity about them—justified or not.

At the time I was writing that part of the
book in the 1960s, there was little interest in the right hemisphere.
Even as late as 1964, some leading neuroscientists were saying that the
right hemisphere did nothing, suggesting it was like a spare tire. But
since then we have seen an explosion of findings about right hemisphere
function, leading, I am afraid, to a popularization that verges on some
of the shrill excesses of similar discussions of asymmetrical hemisphere
function in the latter part of the nineteenth century[9]
and also in the twentieth century.[10]

But
the main results, even conservatively treated, are generally in
agreement with what we might expect to find in the right hemisphere on
the basis of the bicameral hypothesis. The most significant such
finding is that the right hemisphere is the hemisphere which processes
information in a synthetic manner. It is now well known from even more
studies that the right hemisphere is far superior to the left in fitting
together block designs (Kohs Block Design Test), parts of faces, or
musical chords,[11]
and such synthetic functions were indeed those of the admonitory gods in
fitting together civilizations.

The
reader has by now guessed that a somewhat crucial experiment is
possible. Since I have supposed that the verbal hallucinations heard by
schizophrenics and others are similar to those once heard by bicameral
people, could we not test out this cerebral location in the right
temporal lobe of the voices by one of the new brain imaging techniques,
using patients as they are hallucinating? This has recently been tried
using cerebral glucography with positron tomography, a very difficult
procedure. Indeed, the results demonstrated that there was more glucose
uptake (showing more activity) in the right temporal lobe when the
patient was hearing voices.[12]

I
wish to emphasize that these four hypotheses are separable. The last,
for example, could be mistaken (at least in the simplified version I
have presented) and the others true. The two hemispheres of the brain
are not the bicameral mind but its present neurological model. The
bicameral mind is an ancient mentality demonstrated in the literature
and artifacts of antiquity.

The
last line of Book III sounds indeed like a ponderous finality of
judgment. It is. But it is also the beginning, the opening up of human
nature as we know it and feel it profoundly because consciously in
ourselves, with all its vicissitudes, clarifies, and obscurities.
Because of the documentation, we can see this most clearly in Greece in
the first half of the first millennium B.C., where the change can truly
be called

The
Cognitive Explosion.

With consciousness comes an increased importance of the spatialization
of time and new words for that spatialization, like chronos. But
that is to put it too mildly. It is a cognitive explosion with the
interaction of consciousness and the rest of cognition producing new
abilities. Whereas bicameral beings knew what followed what and where
they were, and had behavioral expectancies and sensory recognitions just
as all mammals do, now conscious, humans can 'look' into an imagined
future with all its potential of terror, joy, hope, or ambition, just as
if it were already real, and into a past moody with what might have
been, or savoring what did, the past emerging through the metaphier of a
space through I whose long shadows we may move in a new and magical
process called remembrance or reminiscence.

Reminiscent memory (or episodic memory, as it is sometimes called),[13]
in sharp contrast to habit retention (or semantic memory), is new to the
world with consciousness. And because a physical space in the world can
always be returned to, so we feel irrationally, somehow certain,
impossibly certain, that we should be able to return again to some often
unfinished relationship, some childhood scene or situation or regretted
outburst of love or temper or to undo some tragic chance action back in
the imagined in existent space of the past.

We
thus have conscious lives and lifetimes and can peer through the murk of
tomorrow toward our own dying. With the prodding of Heraclitus in the
sixth century B.C.,[14]
we invent new words or really modifications of old words to name
processes or symbolize actions over time by adding the suffix sis
and so be conscious of them, words in Greek like gnosis, a
knowing; genesis, a beginning; emphasis, a showing in;
analysis, a loosening up; or particularly phronesis, which is
variously translated as intellection, thinking, understanding, or
consciousness. These words and the processes they refer to are new in
the sixth and seventh centuries B.C.[15]

The Self

Along this new lifetime, putting together similar occurrences or
excerpts of them—inferences from what others tell us we are and from
what we can tell ourselves on the basis of our own consciousness of what
we have done—we come to construct or invent, on a continuing basis, in
ourselves and in others, a self. The advantage of an idea of your self
is to help you know what you can or can't do or should or should not
do. Bicameral individuals had stable identities, names to which they or
others could attach epithets, but such verbal identity is a far
shallower form of behavior than the consciously constructed although
variable, fragile, and defensive self that shakily pilots us through the
alternatives of living consciously.

Particularly with regard to the self, but also in all of the treacherous
terminology of mind, we must beware of the perils of polysemy or
homonymic or multi-referential confusion, as I have called it
elsewhere. This results from the historical growth and inner
alterations of most mental terms; the referrent of a term changes
usually with the addition of new conscious referrents until the term is
really multi-referential. "Self" is a good example. Originally, the
word (or corresponding word in whatever language) probably was simply
used as an identity marker as in all its many compounds: self-employed,
self-discipline, etc. Or as when we say a fly washes itself. But with
the fractal-like proliferation and intensification of consciousness
through history, particularly since the twelfth century A.D., a very
different referrent of "self" came into existence. It is the answer to
the question "Who am 1?” Most social psychologists accept that
denotation of self.

Thus, as John Locke somewhere says,[16]
if we cut off a finger, we have not diminished the self. The body is
not the self. An early critic of my book pointed to the well-known fact
that mirrors were used far back into antiquity[17]
and therefore such ancient peoples were conscious. But we don't see our
selves in mirrors, although we say so; we see our faces. The face is
not the self.

Because of the importance of this confusion and its frequency in
misunderstanding my book, I would like here to describe a few other
studies briefly. When presented with mirrors, most fish, birds, or
mammals react with complete disinterest or else engage in social or
aggressive displays or attack their mirror images. But humans and
chimpanzees are different: they like mirrors. Human children go through
four stages of behavior with respect to their mirror images. At first
there is little reaction, then smiling, touching, vocalizing as if it
were another child, then a stage of testing or repetitive activity while
observing the mirror image intently, and then, when the child is almost
two years old, the adult reaction to the image as if it were its own.[18]
The test for this final stage has been to smear rouge on the child's
nose and then have the child look in a mirror and see if the child
touches its nose—which it readily does by age two.[19]

But
the real interest in this phenomenon began when Gallup showed that the
same effect could be obtained with chimpanzees.[20]
Chimpanzees after extensive experience with mirrors were put under deep
anesthesia. Then a conspicuous spot of red dye was daubed on the brow
or top half of an ear. Upon awakening, the chimpanzees paid no
attention to the markings, showing that no local tactile stimulation was
present. But when a mirror was provided, the chimpanzees, who by now
were very familiar with their mirror images, immediately reached for the
color spot to rub or pick it off, showing they knew the mirror images of
themselves. Other chimpanzees that had had no experience with mirrors
did not react in this way. Hence it was claimed that chimpanzees have
selves and self-recognition. Or, in the words of one of the major
senior figures in animal behavior, "the results provide clear evidence
of self-awareness in chimpanzees.”[21]

This conclusion is incorrect. Self-awareness usually means the
consciousness of our own persona over time, a sense of who we are, our
hopes and fears, as we daydream about ourselves in relation to others.
We do not see our conscious selves in mirrors, even though that image
may become the emblem of the self in many cases. The chimpanzees in
this experiment and the two-year-old child learned a point-to-point
relation between a mirror image and the body, wonderful as that is.
Rubbing a spot noticed in the mirror is not essentially different from
rubbing a spot noticed on the body without a mirror. The animal is not
shown to be imagining himself anywhere else, or thinking of his life
over time, or introspecting in any sense—all signs of a conscious self.

This less interesting, more primitive interpretation was made even
clearer by an ingenious experiment done in Skinner's laboratory.[22]
Essentially the same paradigm was followed with pigeons, except that it
required a series of specific trainings with the mirror, whereas the
chimpanzee or child in the earlier experiments was, of course,
self-trained. But after about fifteen hours of such training when the
contingencies were carefully controlled, it was found that a pigeon also
could use a mirror to locate a blue spot on its body which it could not
see directly, though it had never been explicitly trained to do so. I
do not think that a pigeon because it can be so trained has a
self-concept.

From Affect to Emotion

The new spatialized time in which events
and experiences could be located, remembered, and anticipated results
not only in the conscious construction of a self, but also in a dramatic
alteration of our emotions. We share with other mammals a not very
orderly repertoire of affects whose neural substrate was evolved long
ago by natural selection into the limbic system deep in the brain. I
wish here to mention three: fear, shame, and mating. And in doing so I
wish to forewarn the reader that terminology is again a problem,
particularly in this area—even the word affect, which I do not like to
use because it is so often confused with effect and sounds strange to
the nonprofessional. By affect, psychology means to designate a
biologically organized behavior that has a specific anatomical
expression and a specific biochemistry, one that dissipates with time.
But with consciousness, all this is changed.

I
shall call this consciousness of a past or future affect an emotion, as
that is how we describe it. And what I am proposing here is a
two-tiered theory of emotions for modern human beings as distinguished
from bicameral man and other animals.[23]
There are the basic affects of mammalian life and then our emotions,
which are the consciousness of such affects located inside an identity
in a lifetime, past or future, and which, be it noted, have no
biologically evolved mechanisms of stopping.

From Fear
to Anxiety

In
fear, there are a class of stimuli, usually abrupt and menacing, which
stop the animal or person from ongoing behavior, provoke flight, and in
most social mammals produce specific bodily expressions and internally a
rise in the level of catecholamines in the blood, such as adrenalin and
noradrenalin. This is the well-known emergency response, which
dissipates after a few minutes if the frightening object or situation is
removed.

But
with consciousness in a modern human being, when we reminisce about
previous fears or imagine future ones, fear becomes mixed with the
feeling of anxiety. If we wish to make echoes here of the James-Lange
theory of the emotions, we would call anxiety the knowledge of our
fear. We see a bear, run away in fear, and have anxiety. But anxiety
as a rehearsal of actual fear partially occasions the emergency response
at least weakly. It is man's new capacity for conscious imagery that
can keep an analog of the frightening situation in consciousness with a
continuing response to it. And how to turn off this response with its
biochemical basis was and I think still is a problem for conscious human
beings, particularly with the resulting increase in catecholamine levels
and all its long-term effects. I would ask you here to consider what it
was like for an individual back in the first millennium B.C. to have
these anxieties that did not have their own built-in mechanism of
cessation and before human beings learned conscious mechanisms of
thought for doing so.

This is demonstrated in the famous incident described by Herodotus of
the very first tragedy performed in Athens. It was performed only
once. The play was The Fall of Miletus by Phrynicus, describing
the sack of that Ionian city by the Persians in 494. B.C., a disaster
that had happened the previous year. The reaction of the audience was
so extreme that all Athens could not function for several days.
Phrynicus was banished, never to be heard of again, and his tragedy
burnt.

From
Shame to Guilt

The second biological affect I wish to
consider here is shame. Because it is a socially evoked affect, it has
rarely been studied experimentally, in either animals or humans. It is
a complicated affect whose occasioning stimuli often have to do with
maintaining hierarchical relationships in highly social animals, and is
the submissive response to rejection by the hierarchical group. While
such biological shame is apparent as a controlling mechanism in
carnivore groups, it is much more obvious among the primates, and
particularly in human beings. We seem to be ashamed to talk about
shame, and, indeed, as adults, we have been so shaped by shame in the
past, so confined to a narrow band of socially acceptable behavior, that
it is rarely occasioned.

But
when we think back to our childhoods, the piercing, throbbing trauma of
being rejected by our peer groups, the fear of inappropriately crossing
over from the private domain into the public countenance, the agony when
we do, particularly in relation to sexual and excretory functions,
toilet accidents of others or ourselves, but also in a milder form, in
wanting to be dressed the same as other children, to receive as many
valentines, and to be promoted with the rest, or have parents equal in
wealth, health, or promise to the parents of others, or not to be beaten
up or teased by others, sometimes even to be average in schoolwork when
one is really superior—anything to be sure that one is snugly sunk
deeply into one's cohort—these are some of the most powerful and
profound influences on our development. We should remember here that as
we grow older, our cohort is less and less our immediate peer group and
more and more our family tradition, race, religion, union, or
profession, et cetera.

The
physiological expression of shame or humiliation involves of course
blushing, dropping of the eyes and of the head, and the behavioral one
of simply hiding from the group. Unfortunately, nothing is known about
its biochemical or neurological basis.

If
you wish to feel shame in its pure form, this stepping outside what is
expected of you, simply stand out in a busy street and shout out the
time in minutes and seconds over the heads of everyone who passes by,
and do it for five minutes—or until you are taken away. This is shame,
but not guilt, because you have done nothing your society has taught you
to call wrong.

And
now consider what conscious reminiscence and imagery of the future bring
to this affect. And particularly consider this in the milieu of
ethical, right and wrong that developed as markers for behavior after
the breakdown of the bicameral mind with its certainty of gods,
directives. Wrongs, or by another word, sins, or indeed anything that
would eject us from society if it were known or seem to eject us from
society can be reminisced about out of the past and worried about for
the future. And this we call guilt. No one before 1000 B.C. ever felt
guilt, even while shame was the way groups and societies were held
together.

To
indicate the evidence that guilt as opposed to shame is a new emotion at
this time, I would cite a single bit of evidence, and one that is well
known.[24]
This is the story of Oedipus. It is referred to in two lines of the
Iliad and two lines in the Odyssey which I think we can take as
indicating the true story, as it came down from bicameral times. The
story seems to be about a man who killed his father and then unwittingly
married his mother and so became King of Thebes, proceeding to have
several children-siblings by his mother, then discovering what he had
done, certainly feeling shame since incest had always been a taboo, but
evidently recovering from that shame, living a happy life thereafter
with his wife-mother, and dying with royal honors sometime later. This
was written down around 800 B.C., but the story comes from several
centuries before that.

And
then, only four hundred years later, we have the great trilogy of
Sophocles on the subject, a play about unknown guilt, guilt so extreme
that a whole city is in famine because of it, so convulsive that the
culprit when he discovers his guilt is not worthy to look upon the world
again and stabs his eyes into darkness with the brooches clutched from
his mother-wife's breasts, and is led away by his sister-daughters into
a mystical death at Colonus.

And again, there is no biological mechanism
for getting rid of guilt. How to get rid of guilt is a problem which a
host of learned social rituals of reacceptance are now developed:
scapegoat ceremonies among the Hebrews (the word for sending away
translates now as "forgiveness"), the similar pharmakos among the
Greeks (again the word aphesis for sending the pharmakos away
becomes the Greek for "forgiveness"), "purification" ceremonies of many
sorts, baptism, the taurobolium, the haj, confession, the tashlik, the
mass, and of course the Christian cross, which takes away the sins of
the world (note the metaphors and analogies in all this). Even changing
the nature of God to a forgiving father.

And
I would also have you note here that while the affects are usually
discrete, and evoked in very specific kinds of situations for specific
kinds of responses, the emotions in consciousness are not discrete, can
meld and evoke each other. I've just said that in guilt we can have
worry about future shameful experiences, which indeed is anxiety, and we
thus have two emotions, anxiety and guilt, coming together as an even
more powerful emotion.

From
Mating to "Sex"

The
third example I would consider here is the affect of mating. It is
similar in some respects to other affects but in other ways quite
distinct. Animal studies show that mating, contrary to what the popular
mind thinks, is not a necessary drive that builds up like hunger or
thirst (although it seems so because of consciousness), but an elaborate
behavior pattern waiting to be triggered off by very specific stimuli.
Mating in most animals is thus confined to certain appropriate times of
the year or day as well as to certain appropriate sets of stimuli as in
another's behavior, or pheromones, light conditions, privacy, security,
and many other variables. These include the enormous variety of
extremely complicated courtship procedures that for rather subtle
evolutionary advantages seem in many animals almost designed to prevent
mating rather than to encourage it, as one might expect from an
oversimplified idea of the workings of natural selection. Among the
anthropoid apes, in contrast to other primates, mating is so rare in the
natural habitat as to have baffled early ethologists as to how these
most human-like species reproduced at all. So too perhaps with
bicameral man.

But
when human beings can be conscious about their mating behavior, can
reminisce about it in the past and imagine it in the future, we are in a
very different world, indeed, one that seems more familiar to us. Try
to imagine what your "sexual life" would be if you could not fantasize
about sex.

What is the evidence for this change? Scholars of the ancient world, I
think, would agree that the murals and sculptures of what I'm calling
the bicameral world, that is, before 1000 B.C.) are chaste; depictions
with sexual references are scarcely existent, although there are
exceptions. The modest, innocent murals from bicameral Thera now on the
second floor of the National Museum in Athens are good examples.

But
with the coming of consciousness, particularly in Greece, where the
evidence is most clear, the remains of these early Greek societies are
anything but chaste.[25]
Beginning with seventh century B.C. vase paintings, with the depictions
of ithyphallic satyrs, new, semi-divine beings, sex seems indeed a
prominent concern. And I mean to use the word concern, for it does not
at first seem to be simply pornographic excitement. For example, on one
island in the Aegean, Delos, is a temple of huge phallic erections.

Boundary stones all over Attica were in the form of what are called
herms: square stone posts about four feet high, topped with a
sculptured head usually of Hermes and, at the appropriate height, the
only other sculptured feature of the post, a penile erection. Not only
were these herms not laughter-producing, as they certainly would be to
children of today, they were regarded as serious and important, since in
Plato's Symposium "the mutilation of the herms" by the drunken general
Alcibiades, in which he evidently knocked off these protuberances with
his sword around the city of Athens, is regarded as a sacrilege.

Erect phalli of stone or other material have been found in large numbers
in the course of excavations. There were amulets of phalli. Vase
paintings show naked female dancers swinging a phallus in a Dionysian
cult. One inscription describes the measures to be taken even in times
of war to make sure that the phallus procession should be led safely
into the city. Colonies were obliged to send phalli to Athens for the
great Dionysian festivals. Even Aristotle refers to phallic farces or
satyr plays which generally followed the ritual performances of the
great tragedies.

If
this were all, we might be able to agree with older Victorian
interpretations that this phallicism was merely an objective fertility
rite. But the evidence from actual sexual behavior following the advent
of conscious fantasy speaks otherwise. Brothels, supposedly instituted
by Solon, were everywhere and of every kind by the fourth century B.C.
Vase paintings depict every possible sexual behavior from masturbation
to bestiality to human threesomes, as well as homosexuality in every
possible form.

The
latter indeed began only at this time, due, I suggest, in part to the
new human ability to fantasize. Homosexuality is utterly absent from
the Homeric poems. This is contrary to what some recent Freudian
interpretations and even classical references of this period
(particularly after its proscription by Plato in The Laws as
being contrary to physis, or nature), seeking authorization for
homosexuality in Homer, having projected into the strong bonding between
Achilles and Patroclus.

And
again I would have you consider the problem twenty-five hundred years
ago, when human beings were first conscious and could first fantasize
about sex, of how they learned to control sexual behavior to achieve a
stable society. Particularly because erectile tissue in the male is
more prominent than in the female, and that feedback from even partial
erections would promote the continuance of sexual fantasy (a process
called recruitment), we might expect that this was much more of a
male problem than a female one. Perhaps the social customs that came
into being for such control resulted in the greater social separation of
the sexes (which was certainly obvious by the time of Plato) as well as
an enhanced male dominance. We can think of modern orthodox Muslim
societies in this respect, in which an exposed female ankle or lock of
hair is punishable by law.

I
certainly will admit that there are large vacant places in the evidence
for what I am saying. And of course there are other affects, like anger
becoming our hatred, or more positive ones like excitement with the
magical touch of consciousness becoming joy, or affiliation
consciousized into love. I have chosen anxiety, guilt, and sex as the
most socially important. Readers of a Freudian persuasion will note
that their theorizing could begin here. I hope that these hypotheses
can provide historians more competent than myself with a new way of
looking at this extremely important period of human history, when so
much of what we regard as modern psychology and personality was being
formed for the first time.

There is so much more to do, so many more bays and inlets of history and
theory to explore. The tracking of ancient mentalities is an ongoing
process that is leading to new insights and discoveries. Since I do not
know Chinese, I could not address that part of the data in the book.
But I am pleased that my associate Michael Carr, an expert in ancient
Chinese texts, is making up for that lack in a series of definitive
papers.[26]
The dating here is approximately the same as in Greece, which has led
some historians to call this period the "axial age."

Several scholars have explored the ramifications of the theory in
literature, particularly Judith Weissman, whose book with the working
title of Vision, Madness, and Morality, Poetry and the Theory of the
Bicameral Mind is being completed as I am writing.[27]
Thomas Posey is continuing his studies of verbal hallucinations, Ross
Maxwell is doing further historical studies, and many others, such as D.
C. Stove,[28]
I also thank for their support and encouragement.
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, 1990

[3] My friend W. V. Quine strenuously objects
to my metaphrand-metaphier coinage because they are hybrids of
Latin and Greek. I have opted to keep them however for their
connotative association with multiplicand and multiplier. He
has made the interesting suggestion that perhaps this
distinction is related to the latent-manifest distinction of
psychoanalysis. Are dreams metaphors? Is what Freud called the
unconscious actually the latent metaphrand operated on by the
manifest metaphier?

[4] It would be interesting to see
experimentally if training in accurate and fast attention
resulted in better concentration in tasks when tested with
distraction.

[6] For readers who would like an abstract of
how this theory translates into dreams, I would suggest that
they read my Bauer Symposium lecture in Canadian Psychology,
1986, 27:128-182, particularly pages 146 and I47.

[15] This has been noted and emphasized by
several classical scholars including Bruno Snell, speaking of "a
new 'mental' concord that apparently was not possible before the
seventh century when a new dimension of the intellect is
opened." Cited by Joseph Russo in "The Inner Man in Archilochus
and the Odyssey," Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies,
1974, .5:139, n. i, who prefers an earlier date for this
transformation, as his title indicates.

[16] But see Locke's profoundly modern
discussion in Essay on the Human Understanding, II:10-29.

[17] Exactly the significance of such mirrors
is a question. In the archeological museum in Riyadh, Saudi
Arabia, I have seen an ancient tombstone with the outline of a
lady holding such a mirror. Would this be vanity? Were mirrors
hand idols which were common in bicameral Mesopotamia? The
mystery of the use of mirrors in Mayan iconography should also
be noted, as it usually represents a god or the brightness of a
god. See Linda Schele and Mary Ellen Miller, The Blood of
Kings (Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, 1986).

[24] E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the
Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951).

[25] Most of this information and references
can be found in Hans Licht, Sexual Life in Ancient Greece
(London: Routledge, 1931), or in G. Rattray Taylor, Sex in
History (New York: Vanguard Press, 1954).

[26] Michael Carr, "Sidelights on Xin
'Heart, Mind' in the Shijing," abstract in Proceedings
of the 31st CISHAAN, Tokyo and Kyoto, 1983, 824-825,
and his "Personation of the Dead in Ancient China,"
Computational .Analyses Of Asian and African Languages,
1985, 1-107.

[27] The title also of one of her papers:
"Vision, Madness, and Morality: Poetry and the Theory of the
Bicameral Mind," Georgia Review, 1979, 33:118-158. See
also her “Somewhere in Earshot: Yeats' Admonitory Gods,"
Pequod, 1982, 14 : 16-31.

[28] D. C. Stove, "The Oracles and Their
Cessation: A Tribute to Julian Jaynes," Encounter, April
1989, pp. 30-38.